This community building includes a large function room, a few local society rooms, a foyer, serving areas and a covered outdoor area. A typology naturally emerges from the analysis of constructed examples and from interpretation of the specifications: a function room and foyer on the ground floor opening onto a large external covered space, serving areas on the sides and local society rooms on the first floor or in the basement.

This typology, which has already proven highly successful in other contexts, poses three major problems here: (a) The two-floor layout creates a building whose scale far exceeds that of the semi-urban fabric to which it must belong. Its insertion is thus rendered very difficult; b) The large function room becomes an inactive "black hole" in the village centre when not in use. The smaller and more often used local society rooms, for their part, find themselves cut off from the public space and the village, which cannot benefit from their activities; c) The outdoor space is a void that needs to be defined spatially by the community hall. Yet, it has no interaction with the function room, since it is a closed and protected place.

This project tries to resolve these three issues by locating the spaces used for more regular activities on the ground floor and the large function room above. This arrangement reduces both the building’s scale and footprint by opting for a more compact, raised structure. With the long, single window facades of the function room on the first floor rather than at pedestrian level, the highly-glazed ground floor is completely permeable and opens onto the village.

The architectural approach results directly from the programmatic one, which it aims to reinforce and enhance. The community hall, a simple volume built completely of wood, rests on a concrete "table" of which four of the eight load bearing points have a use in the programme. The fluidity of the ground floor is enhanced by large overhangs, made possible in fact by the raising of the edges and the four central reinforcements.The apparent structural prowess is in fact simply achieved. The concrete “table" stands on a reference level of +415.40 m, directly connected to the village square while maintaining its spatial and visual fluidity. With its simple and modest timber structure resting on this concrete “table", the new community hall finds its roots in the old Swiss Alpine rural buildings known as mazots, which are also, but for other reasons, raised above the ground. A mix of tradition and innovation...